The Last Grandparent
Recently, a college friend was visiting a town to meet her last living grandparent. As it happened, I was in the same town for a similar reason. Our visits had coincided by chance a few years ago on our university campus, and we eventually connected over our shared experience of having lost a parent. Over time, that understanding deepened our friendship. I was recalling one of our conversations where she mentioned, “You must relate too, how hard it is to see them so frail, since you also have a last grandparent.”
I don’t think I had ever consciously thought of my grandmother in that sense. I knew that she was getting older. I noticed the slower steps, the little changes in her voice, the way ordinary things were beginning to take a little more effort for her. I did not realise the terms "The Last Grandparent" until it was said out loud.
Grief has a way of making you conscious of things you would otherwise let pass. It makes you observe life a little too closely, as though you are constantly trying to understand what is happening while it is happening. Since losing my mother, I have found myself paying attention to the people I still have in a way I never did before. I notice the smallest details, hold on to conversations for longer than necessary, and find myself remembering ordinary afternoons while I am still sitting in them.
Grief is an incredibly strict teacher. It teaches you that permanence is fragile, and once you have experienced that kind of loss, it becomes difficult to look at the people you love without knowing that time is moving. Sometimes I feel as though I am carrying an invisible camera around my neck, trying to archive everything. The texture of my grandmother’s skin, her slower walk when we visit the markets, the familiar cadence of her voice, the little things she says without thinking. I want to remember all of it. I want to be able to return to these moments years from now and find them exactly as they were. While this heightened awareness comes from a place of profound love, the constant mental weight can be exhausting. You are never just sitting in a room enjoying a quiet afternoon. You are simultaneously the granddaughter, the archivist, and a guard bracing for an impact that has not even arrived yet.
Sometimes, I miss the person I was before grief became such a defining part of my life. The version of me who could enjoy an afternoon without attaching some larger meaning to it, who did not feel the need to hold on to every little thing, who could leave a conversation without mentally replaying it on the way home. There are days when I find myself get engulfed by the flame of sorrows inflicted by years of forgone memories. I do not know why my soul finds occasional comfort in it, or maybe it has only known of sorrows more than that of joyful days. Yet I try to pick myself back up, gathering the scattered pieces of emotions that are not always easy to understand or manage. I consciously choose to nurture the whimsical and bubbly parts of myself because I know I have already walked down some rather daunting paths in life.
Over the years, I have tried to alchemise some of that pain into something more intuitive. I don’t mean that loss has made everything better or that suffering is necessary for personal growth. I would have gladly learnt certain things differently. I have tried to turn my grief into a greater capacity for understanding, my loss into an appreciation for the people who are still here, and my difficult experiences into a little more patience for the complexities of being human. I suppose I have become more interested in the histories people carry, the circumstances that shape them, and the many things that remain invisible beneath the surface. There is so much more to a person than what we see, and I would like to believe that our experiences can make us a little more generous in how we understand one another. I want to carry that understanding with me. I don’t want my grief to become the reason I grow distant from the world or less available to the people around me. If anything, I want it to make myself more receptive to them.
I am still figuring out how to live with all of this. I have learnt to appreciate the people around me more consciously, but I haven’t learnt how to stop anticipating their absence. I want to preserve memories, but I also want to experience them without constantly thinking about how I might remember them someday. I want to make peace with impermanence, but there are days when I resist it with everything I have. I have learnt to make something meaningful out of my pain, but I sometimes wonder if I would have preferred to remain a little less wise and a little more carefree. Both feelings can co-exist together. I don’t think I need to resolve that contradiction just yet.
Without darkness, light cannot exist. I have always been fascinated by the different ways literature and philosophy have approached the idea of primordial darkness, the notion that before creation there was a state of darkness from which everything eventually emerged. I have always found something comforting in the thought of darkness as a beginning instead of an ending. We tend to associate darkness with absence, uncertainty, and fear but it can also be the space from which something begins. Not every difficult period reveals what comes after it. Sometimes we have to sit with what we don’t understand before we find our way forward.
Oftentimes it hurts to breathe, metaphorically and otherwise, when the weight of everything feels a little too much. On such days, I remind myself to take a deep breath and go a little easier on myself. We arrive into this world empty-handed and leave in much the same way yet spend so much of the time in between accumulating things that we cannot take with us. It is only fitting that we make an effort to leave the world a little more kinder than we found it, even when our own circumstances make that difficult.
We may not always be able to change the darkness surrounding us, but we can try not to contribute to it. I have often wondered what it would take for humanity to become a little gentler with itself. We live in a world that seems increasingly preoccupied with division, hostility, and the pursuit of things that rarely bring us any lasting fulfilment. We cannot always know what someone is carrying, what they have survived, or what it takes for them to get through an ordinary day. I would like to believe that whenever the world feels too dark to live in, we can still choose to become harbingers of light. Not through grand revelations or extraordinary acts, but through the small, deliberate ways in which we make another person's existence a little easier. We can try to pave our way towards a little more understanding, compassion, and lightness in our collective existence.
Where no light of promise seems to shine, we can still find ourselves on the cusp of the brightest dawn. We must keep trying, even when our minds work against us, or when the world gives us enough reasons to become indifferent. I would rather remain curious, tender, and hopeful than allow everything I have experienced to make me indifferent to life. There is still so much to discover, so many people to understand, so many ordinary moments to appreciate, and so much of the world that deserves our attention.
I first read Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night when I was much younger. At the time, I understood it as a poem about resisting death, about refusing to surrender quietly. I understand it differently now, especially knowing that Thomas wrote it in the context of his father’s approaching death. There is something human about wanting more time, about wanting the people we love to stay, even when we know that this is not something we can ask of life. I don’t think accepting impermanence means we have to become indifferent to it. We are allowed to love fiercely, to grieve, and to wish things could have been different.
When I look at my grandmother now, I still find myself noticing the little things. I don’t know how to switch off that instinct to remember, and I am not sure I want to. But I am trying to remind myself that she is here, that we still have afternoons to spend together, conversations to have, and ordinary errands that will become memories in their own time. I don’t want to spend so much of the present preparing for its absence that I forget to be part of it.
Losing someone changes the way you look at everyone who remains. It can make the world feel terribly fragile, but it can also make you more attentive to its small, ordinary wonders. I am learning that I can carry the weight of loss without overlooking what I still have. I can acknowledge the darkness without allowing it to become the only thing I see. And even on the days when I find that difficult, I want to keep choosing life, in all its peculiar, imperfect and ordinary ways.